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Unite 12 Day 1 Summary

So Unite 2012, Day 1 (if you don’t count the Training Day!) is coming to a close. It’s been fantastic time and it’s great to be able to catch up with all the developers I’ve met since the last Unite. We have 1,200 participants this year, 3 fantastic tracks with 25 sessions on the first day!

Today kicked off with the keynote in which a number of cool things were introduced and demoed. I’ll go over some of this now…

First, David brought everyone up to date on all things Unity, opening with a really nice trip down memory lane, showing the evolution of games created with the development tools and going all the way back to the game that started it all.

Secondly, Joachim demoed the Mecanim animation system in 4.0, showing how awesome it is to use motion capture data and spoke about the plans to include lots of Mocap data on the Asset Store: “We are letting people who never had access to mo-cap data to get access to mo-cap data, and really up the quality of your animations.” I’ve played around with some versions of Mecanim and having a background in animation I am really excited to see how this new epic feature is taken advantage of by the community.

Joachim also demoed DirectX 11 that was pioneered by the “Butterfly Effect” project, a short film created by production studio Passion Pictures, and then jumped into the editor to show how the movie was composed and highlighted various features. Unity 4.0 is really pushing the bar for what is achievable in terms of graphical fidelity.

After Joachim showed some more of the many new features in 4.0 including an impressive demo of the improvements to Shruiken it was time for Nicholas to take the stage. He demoed a new timeline function, whereby users can select and manipulate in-game objects, tie them to animations and sounds, and define their behavior in-game, all without a single line of code. “This is a start of an attempt from our side to make time and the world-state first-class citizens in our editor,” he said. He also announced nested prefab support which was very well received by all.

Nicholas also demoed an alpha version of a GUI system for in-game menus. “This is something I’ve been working on for—it feels like even longer than I remember,” he said. It’s editable in real-time, and allows developers to create full 3D interfaces inside the game world.

Adobe’s Director of Gaming, Emmy Huang, took the stage at the Unite 2012 keynote presentation to talk about Adobe Flash Player gaming. The collaboration between Unity and Adobe wil make the Adobe Flash Player deployment tool add-on for Unity an excellent option for bringing Unity-authored games to the incredibly wide audience of the Flash Player.

Finally from the founder-trio we had some awesome new announcements on new platforms we are supporting. We’ve made a deal with Intel that will see games we’ve published through Union released for smartphones and tablets powered by the Atom processor. A range of Unity-developed Android titles will be published on Google Play and other Android markets, through Union.The current catalog of Union games stands at 120 titles. Air Attack, Samurai, and Frisbee Forever have been selected for the Atom deal, with many more to be added later. In addition to that Unity games are now set to support Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 with Unity 4.0.

After the Trio we had the pleasure of hearing from our guest keynote speaker, Peter Molyneux who showed off for the first time his fledgling studio 22 Cans’ first title, the Unity-developed Curiosity. Molyneux’s new project is the first of 22 experimental games from his new studio, all designed to allow participation from millions of simultaneous users. The knowledge gathered from development of Curiosity will then be used in a bigger title a bit further out on the horizon. This future game, the former Lionhead boss and Bullfrog legend’s studio are also developing with Unity.

Oh! … Just one last thing.

We have the keynote video recording uvw unwrapping done!. So see the full keynote videohere. :)

And if you would like a full resolution image of the picture above, let me know in the comments and I’ll throw one together!

I’m really impressed together with your writing talents as smartly as with the layout in your blog. Is that this a paid subject or did you modify it yourself? Anyway stay up the nice quality writing, it is uncommon to look a great weblog like this one nowadays..

I’ve been around since GooBall :) Guys this keynote was one of the most inspirational ever. You guys have done things right and the fruits of your labor show. A thriving community, great products, and helping great games get out there. The talk by Peter Molyneux was sensational, and was a real encouragement for me. It’s really cool seeing your success from the beginning.

Cheers to Unity technologies and all of the awesomeness there.
Thanks for the video so much!!! Hopefully i’ll be there next year.
@typt IE 10 metro style will not support any plugins including unity player so it will not be available there.
for supporting metro style apps in windows 8 unity should support Win RT instead of Win32 at first (It’s for doing OS dependent stuff like IO/window/file handing and …), and then also support ARM compilation of it’s player if they want it on ARM devices as well but when they announce it, they surely mean that because most phones are arm based and none metro win 8 is already supported.
so first it might just be x86 metro, then arm metro as well and then phone but phone will be a seperate license if they follow android and ios strategy.

I have 3 questions :
-Does ApeX Cloth is available in Unity 4.0 or only in a latter release ?
-Linux support : it will be works in webplayer too ?
-Windows 8 support : Does it means that unity will be available for the renamed “metro” interface ? Does it will works in IE 10 metro interface ?